Pat:

Long, long ago, (1973) in a land far, far-away (Kansas) a budding, young snake lover decided he was tired of just catching and keeping snakes, and decided to keep several of them together in a 55 gallon aquarium. That summer, two of the four different rat snakes that shared that cage secretely got married. He didn't realize it until one day when he walked past the aquarium to see the black rat laying eggs. He called around (no Internet) and after speaking to several people, one of them recommended that he dampen some paper towels and incubate those eggs in a warm place. He set up 1/3 of the clutch in one of his wife's Corningware dishes and wrapped cellophane over the top and secured it with a rubber band. A second Corningware bowl became the temporary home for another 1/3 of the eggs, and the remaining 1/3 of those eggs was placed on damp paper towels inside a gallon glass jar and sealed with cellophane. Since no-one he spoke to would tell him the temperature that would be safe for incubation, one jar was set atop a cage in the air-conditioned attic of his home, where most of his reptiles were housed. Another was set on a shelf in the garage, and the last one in the living room. None of those embryos died and one day, out in the hot garage, a slight movement caught his peripheral vision. Yup. Three snakes were slithering around in the jar. They were silver with darker gray markings. They later developed yellow necks and heads and it was decided that the yellow rat was Dad. It appeared that damp paper towels and heat (quite a bit of it) seemed to be the recipe for hatching rat snake eggs. BTW, the other snakes in that 55-gal were gray and red rats. Later, it was determined that the black rat was the only female and don't ask why all the babies looked the same. Shrug?
NOTE: Paper towels are not a good incubation medium and most people now use vermiculite, perlite, or a combination of the two.

In 1977, he worked hard to buy his first amel red rat (corn) - a great deal for $200.00 because it would not eat. Yup, it died of starvation. but that did not deter him. He worked hard in the restaurant business, and along with some coins he earned from catching lizards in western deserts (NO, not gilas), he ponied up for a pair of "Okeetee" corns that were het for albino. That was 1978. A few years and a few generations later, he noticed that some of his albinos had very wide white margins and the colors in them were saturated and contrasting. He didn't know what to call them, so he sold them to local pet stores in Wichita as albino corns. Not long after that (before the Internet), he heard about a lady that bred lots of different colors of corns. Her name was Kathy and she and her husband co-owned Glades Herp in Florida. He called her and ordered one of her price lists, which she "snail" mailed to him. On this list, were albinos like low-whites, no-whites, candy canes and reverse Okeetees. Along with a friend, he ended up with one of the reverse Okeetees and it was virtually identical to his albino Okeetees with the wide white margins. He therefore deduced that the ones he was producing in Kansas were reverse Okeetees. It wasn't until later he learned that part of the recipe for Kathy's animals included Emory's (great plains) rat snakes. He never bred Kathy's animals into that line and never bothered to change the name of his line. They're still called reverse Okeetees on his web site and I'm certain they're pure corns. Those original breeders had never been near an Emory's rat and some of the corns that were bred into that line in the 70s and 80s were captured on Okeetee Hunt Club property.

As many of you know, Rich Z. was working on the same projects. So people didn't confuse his pure corns with hybrids (then, they were called intergrades), he called his fluorescent orange corns and through natural selection there at Serpenco, he created and maintained a look that was unlike the reverse Okeetees in the market and made from PURE corns. In just one generation of crossing Rich's fluorescents to my reverse Okeetees, I produced animals like both parents, and some in-between.

Hence, I don't know what others are doing out there, and I DO have SOME reverse Okeetee lines here that are the result of introducing specimens I purchased here and there, but I can tell you that most (if not all) my reverse Okeetees are related to those first Okeetees I bought back in the 70s.

Don
South Mountain Reptiles

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